Early years education must involve parents too | Letters
Damien Hinds' reported proposal for early years education (Children starting school 'cannot communicate in full sentences', 31 July) reflects a lack of knowledge about how language works. Firstly, the proposal conflates school-based literacy norms with the everyday speaking and communication skills that children from all social backgrounds are generally equally proficient in. The main assumption is that communication necessarily involves "speaking in sentences". It does not. Spoken language works to a communicational design that does not fit into the structures of the written language "sentence". Listen to any conversation between communicatively competent adults and you will find very few "complete sentences". Being able to write in "sentences" is necessary for school literacy but this is something that school is supposed to teach.
The report also alleges that more than a quarter of children are starting school without the "required level of speaking or reading skills". Again, speaking and reading are very different skills learned in different contexts for different purposes - so what exactly is this "required level" and who is requiring it? We suspect that Hinds is following an agenda set by middle-class speakers of standard English who assume that their linguistic conventions are the only ones worth knowing and must therefore be required of all children. This proposal for intervention in early years education will therefore very likely be based on nothing more than prejudice, dressed up as concern for social mobility. Instead of a divisive educational policy based on stigmatising the linguistic skills of some children, we need an inclusive one in which the role of the school is to value and positively build on the communicational proficiencies that all children develop in their families and communities.
Dr Karen Grainger and Dr Peter Jones
Principal lecturers in English language, Sheffield Hallam University